The present invention relates generally to the field of digital imaging, and more particularly to image obfuscation.
Privacy is becoming increasingly more important as new technological advances continue to enter the consumer marketplace. With the advent of social media, images are being shared constantly, thus further increasing the need for privacy. It is commonplace for a photograph of a user to be uploaded to a social media website without the user being aware that their photo was added to the site. This may result in an undesirable photo of the user being made available to a wide audience including acquaintances and non-acquaintances alike, thus compromising a user's privacy. A user may be aware of their image being uploaded, but may want to prevent certain users from being able to see them in the image in order to further protect privacy. While a variety of image obfuscation processes currently exist to protect a user's privacy, these techniques usually come with a tradeoff between the quality of the obfuscation and the quality of the image after removing the obfuscation.